Srap Tasmaner

I was going to ignore this, but seriously Banno? Rather than play Dummett, I'll just ask both of you for a citation. Since I haven't read nearly every...

Can you expand on this? Would you also describe this as the process of becoming "less and less wrong"? Is there a succinct way to describe that withou...

Here's another stab at this ... There are games of coordination (the sort of thing that Lewis takes as the basis of convention) and games of competiti...

In our discussion here, this always turned into the possibility of knowing that a statement is true. Is that the same thing? Something else: we talked...

It's a good question, and the article @"apokrisis" linked has some interesting quotes. There are two questions here, really: why, as a matter of histo...

He liked to work through issues relating to psychology by taking passages from James as his text, and he and whoever had crammed themselves into his r...

LW also used James's Principles of Psychology as a text for his "classes".

BTW, I just finished Nate Silver's book, in which power-law distributions play a leading role. I'll check out Ball, and thanks for the reference!

What particularly interested me here was how this intransigent behavior changed the game for everyone. We've all had experiences like this, I should t...

Yes. It seems to have something to do with this 10% finding referenced in Wikipedia's article about tipping points.

There's no doubt some truth to that, but if you're thinking specifically of the "backfire effect", it's worth checking out this interview: "After new ...

Yes. And in fact Dummett was a devout Roman Catholic, iirc. I was aiming for, let's say, "strategic overstatement", but I think I wound up with bolloc...

Let's. Let's say something can be true whether you know it or not, whether you even can know it or not, either in principle or just as a matter of fac...

Hmmmmmm.

Okay, yes. Of course. (Been at work for 11 hours now and should probably quit trying to do philosophy at the same time.)

I'm good with pretty much all of this, or something close to it. But this is the hard part. Allowing truth to attach to sentence tokens allows a clean...

Yes. But here I'd like to slow down. Did you say "what's expressed by a sentence" rather than just "a sentence" for a reason? Is it the sentence that'...

I think the next simple, common sense step is to say that a population using the word "gold" to refer to gold is a convention, but there being such a ...

But you don't want to say that to know a word refers to gold, you have to know what gold is?

I think you're just saying this: attributing to someone knowledge of what the word for gold is, presupposes that they know what gold is. And that seem...

Maybe it's simpler to look at adults who already have a full complement of concepts and empirical abilities but are learning a new language.

Well I'm certainly not suggesting that. After all, we already agreed you can be competent using a word without knowing everything there is to know abo...

That looks like a nice example. If you pushed it farther, say gold has long since disappeared, you might say things like "They used to find something ...

There's a distinction there, yes, and someone whose linguistic competence includes using the word "gold" properly, in whatever sense, may occasionally...

That's the sort of thing I mean. I just mean "observation" in the sense that, presented with a sample of gold, you would assent to "That's gold." Noth...

Alright, so I want to see if we can work our way back toward the OP. If we want to link meaning and truth conditions, we want not the word "gold" on i...

I agree, but it's a complication I was putting off. So are you inclined to say that people who think gold doesn't melt know how to use the word "gold"...

But whether the word "gold" has been used correctly doesn't depend on whether you just happen to be pointing at the right sample or used some sensory ...

Then I misunderstood. I thought you had said all there is to using the word "gold" correctly was getting its extension right, which you can do whether...

I think the conflict here is inevitable, because there are intensional and extensional aspects to language. If you approach things from the intensiona...

Whether philosophy as a whole or my approach to it are intellectually bankrupt is off-topic here. We should have ended this long ago.

I think there's room for debate.

Oh no! I wouldn't say that at all. I am intensely curious about everything I've mentioned in this thread, and open to being persuaded either way. My r...

I see your point, yes. There were two different stands of thought there I was trying to keep separate. I even numbered them: one is Dummett's intuitio...

I don't know what to tell you. It's a thread largely about Michael Dummett. I've been doing my best to make sense of his position. If you're asking wh...

Sure. The question is whether we as forum members give people reasons to continue speaking or reasons not to. For example -- note I am not attributing...

Then it's a good thing this is not what Michael Dummett did.

I'll say two things about Fitch's: 1. If you use intuitionist rules of inference and interpret the logical constants along intuitionist lines, you mig...

"Less inclined to speak" which you put entirely on them if you want, but the circumstances matter.

I don't find Fitch's persuasive at all. Does that rule out talk about the future as our example? If there are or are not such possibilities, how would...

I think statements about the future might fit the bill. Thoughts?

And here's the thing: everything else I've been doing around here lately is pushing me toward thinking these actually are very similar activities. But...

Dude, I may be a little further along than you, but don't think I don't struggle to understand this stuff! Totally worth it though, so keep at it.

We are talking about something like the antinomy of democracy as a model for doing philosophy: open, honest exchange of ideas should lead to better ph...

I think the most that could get you is "GRRM planned to have Jon Snow sit on the Iron Throne" but that can be followed by all sorts of stuff -- who kn...

I wouldn't say "equated". There's an "if and only if" between knowing one and knowing the other ... He does explicitly reject what's here called the "...

Dummett never accepted Davidson's view that truth conditions give you an account or an explanation of meaning. But they do run together, "agreement in...

Statements about the future look like they would be a clearer test case, since we're not inclined to allow knowledge of the future. But then there's a...

Against my previous post, it could be claimed that, in each case we think of, it is only contingent that a given truth could be known, that I haven't ...

Something @"Nagase" mentioned is helpful here, the idea of a designated value. With the 3-position light switch, there are two obvious ways to do this...